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Sunday, May 10, 2009

5th Annual Flying Man Festival

Every year, at the start of May Pocklington has a strange occurrence of flying stuffed animals. All day long they get thrown off the top of the church to plummet to safety at the landing zone beneath. It's all part of the annual Pocklington Flying Man Festival, which took place this weekend.

The reason for the flying teddies? One Thomas Pelling, who decided to try coming down from the church tower on a zip rope back in 1733. The men who were meant to be securing the rope on the ground were a little drunk, or so the story goes, and Pelling smashed into a wall of the church.

So, being British, we decide to celebrate this strange and unfortunate man who met his end in such a silly way. The Flying Man Festival is a 3 day celebration based around All Saints Church with hot air balloons filling the sky, stalls in and around the church and on the Sunday the flying teddy bear slide.

Molly's taken part every year we've been up here and this year it was Charlie Bear's turn to ascend the tower and be sent hurtling down:

Handing Charlie Bear over at the "departure lounge"

Charlie Bear takes flight!

Bear and child reunited. Molly says Charlie had a great time and was only a little scared at the top.

We had, as usual, a lovely day and everything about the festival went very well. This year we even had the added bonus of a flypast by a Spitfire (and unfortunately this happened after the camera batteries died) which was rather spectacular.